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Thursday, September 18, 2014

Choosing your first stockbroker is one of the first hurdles that every self-directed investors/traders have to accomplish towards achieving their financial goals.

According to Wikipedia, a stockbroker is a regulated professional individual, usually associated with a brokerage firm or broker-dealer, who buys and sells stocks and other securities for both retail and institutional clients, through a stock exchange or over the counter, in return for a fee or commission.

Given this, the question: "Who's the best stockbroker?" is usually the first question the comes to mind. But in a relatively young stock market such as the Philippines, investors who are just starting out usually find themselves in a difficult situation on answering this question because there is very few information out there.

So our friends in PinoyMoneyTalk.com (PMT) conducted a survey on who is the best stockbroker in the Philippines to help guide those eyeing to open their first stock trading account. Below are the results as of this writing.

We hope this consolidated lists help you in deciding on w/c Philippine-based stock broker you will open an account with.

Monday, September 15, 2014

If I had some cash in my portfolio, I wouldn't mind to start accumulating at current levels. I would also make sure that my sizing is in such a way that when the price continues to drop from my entry point I'll be a happy buyer at lower levels and I can stomach the paper losses of my initial entry.

$MWC (Manila Water Co) as Bloomberg describes it is a full service water utility company serving the Philippine Market.

Though MWC's customer base is mainly in the Metro Manila, the company is also diversifying it's customer base within the country by catering to non-luzon markets such as Cebu and Boracay, on top of this they are also diversifying regionally in the Asean region with specific interest in the countries Vietnam, Indonesia and Myanmar.

That said we can say that MWC is a business with a strong source of income coming from it's cash cow region - Metro Manila with exciting growth prospects in the future to become not just the water-seller in Metro Manila/Philippines but a key player in the Asean region as well. But of course there are risks.

The main concern with MWC right now is the increasing regulatory risks involved on water tariffs. Simply put, there so called "cash cow" region - Metro Manila is being threatened. There is a risk that the price they will sell the water in Metro Manila will be lower hence this could greatly reduce their sales and thereby earnings and thereby the stock price.

So the question here is do you think these concerns is permanent and will cause MWC to go out of business? Or is this just one of those "bumps" along the way? Let's dig in deeper to strengthen our conviction...

Wednesday, September 3, 2014

As promised last month, we are now publishing the "Top 25 Cheapest Stocks in the Philippines" on a monthly basis to give you guys a sense on what are the cheapest stocks at the current market prices. This will be particularly useful to value investors a.k.a those investors who like to buy companies whose current market price is selling cheap relative to quantifiable metrics such as earnings, sales, book value, dividend etc.

We would like to remind the readers of this website to do due diligence before investing specially on the more iliquid names. Cheers and enjoy!

Note:1. P/E, EV/EBITDA, P/B, P/S were arranged from lowest to highest (lower the numbers means they are cheaper)2. DY was arranged from highest to lowest (higher numbers are better/cheaper)3. Data as of 02-Sep-14

It's story of a South-African "bullied geeky" kid named Elon Reeve Musk who migrated to Canada and the United States because he noticed that the setting of most the comics book he's read is in the US. He then went to school and finished a bachelors degree in Physics in the University of Pennsylvania and his second bachelors degree in Economics in the Wharton School of Business.

He then founded the internet company Zip2 and PayPal - sold them for $300MM and $1.5 Billion respectively, used the proceeds to establish Tesla Motors, Solar City and SpaceX.

As of today, he is worth $11.7 Billion dollars according to the Bloomberg Billionaires index and he's still in his early 40s.

So for the young and "not so young" entrepreneurs and investors out there you'll definitely enjoy this documentary.

"When I was a little kid I was really scared of the dark. But then I sort of came to sense that dark just means the absence of photons in the visible wavelength, 400 to 700 nanometers. Then I thought well it's really silly to be afraid of a lack of photons. Then I wasn't afraid of the dark anymore after that." - Elon Musk